Prepping for Doomsday: Bunkers, Panic Rooms, and Going Off the Grid

Realtor.com -- The apocalypse has become big business. And it’s getting bigger every day.

In the ’50s, homeowners fearing Communist attacks built bunkers in their backyards and basements, hung up a few “God Bless Our Bomb Shelter” signs and called it a Cold War.

But today, Americans en masse are again preparing for the worst—and Communists are just about the only thing not on their list. What is? Terrorist attacks, a total economic collapse, perhaps even zombie invasions. Or maybe just a complete societal breakdown after this November’s scorched-Earth presidential election.

But this is not your Uncle Travis’ guns-and-canned-foods-militia vision of Armageddon preparedness. While the fears of survivalists and so-called preppers are modernizing, so too are their ideas and methods of refuge.

The business of disaster readiness is getting higher-tech, higher-priced, and way more geographically diverse, with state-of-the-art underground shelters tricked out with greenhouses, gyms, and decontamination units in the boondocks and the latest in plush panic rooms in city penthouses.

Welcome to the brave (and for some, highly profitable) new world of paranoia.

“There’s a lot of uneasiness in society. You see it in politics. You see it in the economy. The world is changing really, really quickly and not always for the better,” says Richard Duarte, author of “Surviving Doomsday: A Guide for Surviving an Urban Disaster.”

Prepping “gives them a certain comfort that at least they’ve got some sort of preparations to … take care of their family if things start falling apart all around them,” he says.

Better be safe with a safe room

If the booming sales of panic rooms are any indication, more and more city dwellers these days are obsessively worrying about everything from home invasions to terror attacks. And they’re backing up those worries with cold, hard cash.

Sales of safe (aka panic) rooms, where families can safely lock themselves away from most threats, are up 30% over the same time last year at Gaffco Ballistics, a Londonderry, VT–based installer which does much of its business in New York City, according to CEO Tom Gaffney. That’s driven in part by the terrorist attacks in San Bernardino, CA, and Paris, he says.

Most of his safe rooms are actually fortified master bedrooms, with ballistic fiberglass–reinforced walls, a Kevlar-lined door that is purported to resist both bullets and sledgehammers, and bullet-proof windows—as well as a high-end alarm system that is designed to withstand burglars, rioters, and more.